Two Wheels. One Dark Lord.

Primary menu

Secondary menu

Post navigation

Biker Down – Alice Swanson

I’ve had my head in a book all day Saturday. I don’t know up from down. Go figure. Then I read about this.

Damn.

She was 22.

From: Cameron
Subject: [from DC…]
Hey big Johnny, thought about writing for a while. A friend from college, an absolutely great and amazing person, was killed by a dump truck several months ago in D.C. while on her bike: Here is the link:washingtonpost.com

Fucking tragic man. She lived in a vegetarian co-op in college with me called the Zu. So full of life, and always a smile on her face (a similiar description of the effect she had on people is found in her obit). I found out getting on a plane and cried most of the flight. It makes me look around at our car-filled world and how goddamn vulnerable cycling is, which also happens to be the sanest, healthiest, and most peaceful mode of travel in this industrial age. I won’t stop riding my bicycle, though.

cheers,

Cameron M.
Leadville, CO

I am very sorry to hear about this, Cameron. All I can offer is my condolences. I know that isn’t nearly enought.

About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure.
Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

2 thoughts on “Biker Down – Alice Swanson”

…truth be told, if we all had black armbands w/ a bicycle or a wheel imprinted on them & we wore them whenever we knew another cyclist was taken down, we’ed never have the chance to take those armbands off…

The bad parts about that wreck were: 1. Neither party was doing anything overtly illegal. 2. Proper design of the infrastructure would have prevented the wreck. The immediate cause of the wreck was the cyclist in one of the truck’s blind spots, but the real cause was putting a bike lane to the right of right-turning vehicles. I’m still trying to figure out where to put a bike lane that keeps cars away and prevents the “right hook”. I’ll alert the media when I figure it out.